The 10 best TV shows that never got made (and where to watch them)

After the cancellation of Twin Peaks, Hotel Room and On the Air, David Lynch painted a plywood board angrily declaring: ‘I WILL NEVER WORK IN TELEVISION AGAIN’. In 1999, he got a $7 million green light from Disney-owned ABC for a creepy two-hour pilot set in Los Angeles – but after seeing the results, it was cancelled. A year later, however, French producers paid off ABC and gave Lynch an extra $2 million to turn the failed pilot into a feature film – a critically acclaimed and commercially successful masterpiece that earned Lynch his third Oscar nomination for Best Director.

Watch the unaired pilot here

Inspired by the exploits of real-life NYPD Eddie Egan, The French Connection remains one of the greatest cop thrillers of all time, winning four Oscars including Best Picture. Hackman reprised his role as ‘Popeye’ Doyle in John Frankenheimer’s 1975 sequel, The French Connection II. A decade later, a pre-Married… with Children Ed O’Neill inherited the detective’s iconic pork pie hat in a feature-length pilot investigating a man who picks his feet in Poughkeepsie. 

Watch Popeye Doyle here

Aired in modified form as the 17th episode of the ninth and final series of the hit US version of The Office, The Farm was conceived as a ‘backdoor pilot’ for a proposed spin-off series starring Rainn Wilson as Dwight Schrute, set at his family homestead in the Pennsylvania Dutch community. The death of Dwight’s aunt results in Schrute Farm being left to the family – including beck-bearded brothers played by Breaking Bad’s Matt Jones and Thomas Middleditch (Silicon Valley) – and at the end of the episode, Dwight appears ready to take on the ‘nine-acre worm farm’ full time. 

Watch The Farm on Netflix

What happens when a former astronaut (Jack Black) teams up with a talking motorcycle (voiced by Owen Wilson)? We’ll never know, because Fox canned Ben Stiller’s Heat Vision and Jack (co-created by Rick and Morty’s Dan Harmon) before the first episode was ever broadcast. Jack Austin gains superintelligence after exposure to ‘inappropriate levels of solar energy’, while chattering chopper ‘Heat Vision’ was the result of an accident involving Jack’s burnout roommate, a motorcycle and an experimental ray gun.

Watch Heat Vision and Jack here

Ten years before Samuel L Jackson’s Nick Fury made his first of many appearances in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Iron Man (2008) – and 35 years after his comic book debut in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commando (1963) – the cyclopean ex-CIA agent made his screen debut in a 1998 pilot starring David Hasselhoff. Written by Blade and Dark Knight trilogy screenwriter David Goyer, it pulls Fury out of retirement to return to secret agency S.H.I.E.L.D. to face a new threat by terrorist organisation HYDRA, which has revived a cryogenically preserved baddie plotting to unleash a deadly pandemic on New York.  

Watch Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. here

Between the third and fourth Tremors films – about subterranean monsters in the dusty desert town of Perfection Valley, Nevada – the Sci-Fi Channel made 13 episodes of a spin-off series featuring Dean Norris (Breaking Bad’s Hank), J.D. Walsh and Christopher Lloyd. But what really caused seismic reverberations was SyFy’s announcement that a pilot for a new series had been shot, with Kevin Bacon reprising his role as handyman Val McKee. Despite the promise of the single episode filmed for the proposed series, Bacon confirmed in 2021 that ‘that my dream of revisiting the world of Perfection will not become a reality’.

Watch the trailer here

Between his appearance in the very first episode of Saturday Night Live and his star-making turn in hit sitcom Taxi (1978-83), surrealist entertainer and performance artist Andy Kaufman starred in the television pilot Stick Around. Set in the year 2055, the show revolved around ‘Andy’ (remarkably, not A.N.D.Y.), an obsolete household robot owned by antique store owner Vance Keefer. Hilarity ensues as Andy misunderstands the purpose of various 1970s appliances available for sale in the ‘future’. Although the series was never picked up, its DNA can be found not only in Taxi, but in the hit Happy Days spin-off Mork & Mindy (1978-82), which made a star of Kaufman’s friend Robin Williams.

Watch Stick Around here

Four years after its BBC debut, future Malcolm in the Middle creator Linwood Boomer tried to relaunch Rob Grant and Doug Naylor’s sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf – concerning the motley crew of the eponymous mining spacecraft in the year 3,000,000, in the US. Every character was recast except for Robert Llewellyn’s android, Kryten. ‘Human nature being what it is, there was some fierce jealousy from at least two of the cast,’ Naylor revealed. Craig Charles, who played likeable slob Lister in the UK version, was unhappy for other reasons. ‘The guy who played me was really good,’ he said of Craig Bierko, ‘which pissed me off. But he was like six foot four and handsome.’

Watch Red Dwarf clips here

Seventeen years after Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe and Reese Witherspoon starred in Roger Kumble’s slick, sexy makeover of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses – aka Dangerous Liaisons – a sequel series almost made it to the small screen. In the 45-minute pilot, co-written and directed by Kumble, Gellar reprised her role as Kathryn Merteuil, now married to a wealthy man, her storied past well behind her. But when the son of Sebastian Valmont (Phillippe’s character from the film) discovers his father’s journal, Kathryn’s past is exposed, threatening her plans to take over the Valmont corporation. 

Watch the unaired pilot here

A quarter century before The Sarah Jane Adventures, former Doctor Who companion Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) and robotic dog K-9 were set to star in a spin-off from Tom Baker-era Doctor Who, in which investigative journalist Sarah Jane and K-9 would solve mysteries in sleepy English villages. A single episode, ‘A Girl’s Best Friend’, concerning a ritual sacrifice being plotted by a local witches’ coven, was aired as a Christmas special on 28 December 1981, attracting over eight million viewers – more than the average episode viewership during the same era – but the BBC declined to pick it up for a full series following a change of management.

Watch K-9 and Company here

David Hughes is the author of two books about unproduced films, The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made and Tales from Development Hell. His unproduced pilot for a TV series based on Stigmata (1999) launched his screenwriting career.